Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

We have the member for Denison taking this holier than thou line that he is the only respectable member in this chamber, and everyone else is riffraff.

Let me get back to the point. The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, coupled with the Tasmanian Labor-Greens coalition, have failed my state on just about every single social and economic indicator: unemployment levels are up, education levels are down and budgets on both fronts are in massive deficit. Of all the failures of those two governments, including the federal government, the coastal trading act was perhaps the most effective in assisting the former government in hogtying the Tasmanian economy. Shipping is the lifeblood of the Tasmanian economy. When shipping works, the Tasmanian economy works; when shipping fails, the Tasmanian economy fails.

Just a few weeks ago there was a press release from the Maritime Union of Australia which said, 'We are urging the Abbott government to protect Australian jobs.' They should rewrite that. What they are urging the Abbott government to do is to protect their jobs. At the end of the day, as a government, we have a job to protect all jobs. We do not protect one sector of the economy—10 jobs here—but cost 50 jobs there. If you come to my state and go around my electorate, manufacturers will tell you they have been shedding jobs now for years and years and years. But what this government did was put in place the productivity report. It is, member for Franklin, a complex matter, and we are working very diligently on it.

Under the previous Labor government's coastal shipping reform—where shipping companies were loaded down with bureaucracy, red tape and the need for endless permits, coupled with union protectionism—the shipping industry was effectively run into the ground, costing jobs and increasing costs to consumers and exporters. Yes, it saved some jobs—the jobs that obviously count to the Australian Labor Party—but in my electorate, in my state, it has cost hundreds of other jobs. What you are really saying on the other side of this chamber is that is okay to protect these jobs, and we will do whatever we have to do through legislation, but at the cost of hundreds of other jobs, which obviously do not count.

Labor's coastal shipping reforms are really a throwback to the old Labor new protectionist platform of the early 1990s. Just 49 million tonnes of coastal freight was loaded in 2012-13. Five years earlier, it was over 59 million tonnes. Over the period 2010 to 2030, Australia's freight task is expected to grow by 80 per cent. While the national road and rail component is projected to double, coastal shipping movements are only expected to grow by a mere 15 per cent.

These sorts of figures will not surprise anyone—not least the Labor Party or the member for Grayndler, who will be in the chamber to wrap up this debate—because they knew exactly what they were doing when they introduced this backward-looking reform. They knew that, by implementing their union protectionist policies, overloading shipping companies with red tape and requiring permit after permit to ship goods around the country, it would cost the industry billions of dollars, it would increase the cost of goods to consumers, it would cost jobs and it would hurt the Tasmanian economy. But they pressed ahead regardless of the damage that it was going to wreak on every single business that relies on shipping in this country and particularly in the state of Tasmania—including businesses in my electorate.

In December 2010 the then shadow minister for transport, the Hon. Warren Truss, said:

This change would immediately take us back to the bad old days where companies wanting to ship product around Australia would have to wait weeks and sometimes months for an Australian flagged and crewed vessel to become available.

The now Deputy Prime Minister predicted:

It will be cheaper and simpler to import products from Asia, the United States and even Europe than it will to move them from one port to another in Australia. It will be more attractive to process Australian raw materials overseas than to ship them to an Australian port.

He was spot on. It has cost Tasmanian producers, manufacturers and small businesses money and jobs. (Time expired)

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